Finance

EBay shares were down about 4 percent in initial after-hours trading, after posting second-quarter financial results. But in terms of revenue and earnings per share, the company’s results were in line with expectations. Read More

Acorns is quickly turning into an oak tree in the financial services space. The company now boasts more than 2 million investment accounts (with 600,000 opened in 2017 alone) and is on track to do 1 billion trades in 2017 through the proprietary broker-dealer that it created. Read More

Today Affirm has announced that it has more than 1,000 merchants signed up to offer its financing options at checkout, helping to reduce the friction around making large purchases and, by extension, increasing sales for its partners. Read More

NerdWallet, a personal finance company, laid off six people from its marketing team this week, TechCrunch learned and has since confirmed with NerdWallet. This latest round of layoffs means NerdWallet has cut nine percent of its workforce this year. Read More

Amazon is today introducing a new feature called Amazon Pay Places, that allows customers to pay for in-store and order ahead shopping experiences using their Amazon app. That is, instead of using cash, check, credit or debit while shopping out in the real world, you can just use your Amazon account information. The first implementation of Pay Places involves a partnership with the TGI… Read More

Apple Pay hasn’t really been a major success in France so far. France’s biggest banks still don’t plan to support Apple’s payment service. But two companies announced today that they were going to add Apple Pay support before the end of the year — Lydia and N26. Crédit Mutuel Arkea’s banks also recently announced that they were working on that feature… Read More

A changing of the guard at TransferWise, the unicorn startup based out of London that specialises in providing money-transfer services, typically with better rates than banks and other incumbent providers. The company’s CEO and co-founder Taavet Hinrikus announced that he is stepping down and staying on in a part-time role as chairman and board member. He will be replaced by his… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Demandware founder Stephen Schambach has moved on to his next startup and investors are betting $50 million.
NewStore, an enterprise platform for mobile commerce, has raised a Series B from Activant Capital, General Catalyst and Schambach's own money. The company previously raised $40 million since 2015, but just launched the business late last year.
While Magento, Shopify and others… Read More

In April, Digit announced that in 100 days it would begin charging $2.99 a month to people using its service to automatically save for a rainy day or help pay their bills. Well, 100 days have almost passed, and it’s almost time for those changes to go into effect. Read More

Samsung users will be able to choose PayPal as their preferred method of payment in-app, online and in retail stores through the Samsung Pay mobile payments platform, the companies announced today. The strategic partnership will initially be available to Samsung Pay users in the United States before expanding to other countries, says Samsung.
In addition to supporting PayPal at point-of-sale… Read More

IBM’s Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies’ James Kisner. The group believes that IBM’s investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core growth units — a unit that sits as a proxy for projecting IBM’s… Read More

Applying for homeowner’s insurance should be as easy as waving your phone camera around your room. That’s the premise behind Cover, an app that recommends insurance based on what’s photographed in your home. Whether it’s electronics, jewelry or even your pet, Cover will cover just about anything. Read More

Since launching five years ago, Blend has helped major financial institutions make lending decisions to consumers, in many cases narrowing the time it takes to close a mortgage by seven to 10 days. Today the company is releasing a mobile app that it believes will speed up the process even faster by allowing consumers to more easily communicate with their loan officer. Read More

Micro-investing app Stash has raised an additional $40 million in Series C funding, the company announced this morning, following rapid growth in terms of sign-ups from new users – 86 percent of whom are first-time investors. The startup’s app is designed to help ease people into investing by allowing anyone to start with as little as $5, then build a portfolio you contribute more… Read More

Finding temporary housing for your dog should be as easy as renting an Airbnb. That’s the idea behind Rover, which raised $65 million to expand its pet sitting and dog-walking businesses.
The Seattle-based company got a significant vote of confidence from Spark Capital, which is leading the round and additional capital from existing investors including Menlo Ventures, Foundry Group… Read More

Revolut has raised a $66 million Series B round with Index Ventures leading the round, and existing investors Balderton Capital and Ribbit Capital also participating. The startup will also run another $5 million crowdfunding campaign in a few weeks. The company has raised $83 million in total.
Revolut started as a mobile app that lets you send and receive money in multiple currencies. Over… Read More

It’s been pretty obvious for a few months now, but Google has finally admitted that it’s running its own investment fund targeting machine intelligence startups. The fund will go by the name Gradient Ventures and provide capital, resources and education to AI-first startups. Read More

Twitter has announced that it’s hired a new CFO. Ned Segal is joining the company from Intuit, where he was senior vice president of finance. He also has investment banking experience, having spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs. This could come in handy if Twitter decides to sell themselves. (Just saying!) Read More